Shepherds & wise men

MOHAMMED is a modern Bedouin from the Badia, the "outback" of Jordan. He exchanged his camels years ago for a truck and a big motorised water tanker. For much of the year, he lives a sedentary life in his village in the Tafila district, southeast of the Dead Sea, and keeps his sheep close by, nourished on subsidised feed. In spring, he phones round his friends to discover where the rains have fallen and the grass is lush, loads his flock into trucks, fills his water tanker and heads for distant pastures.

This take-it-or-leave-it nomadism may seem innocent enough, but it is at the centre of a row between ecologists and developers, the result of which could determine the future of both the Bedouin and the Badia. Those who want to develop the area argue that people like Mohammed are destroying the fragile, arid grasslands of Jordan, and are harbingers ...

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